The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
Over time content providers have been pressured to devise techniques to make their content accessible to an increasingly diverse viewing audience. For example, while English is still the predominant language in the United States, the population of Spanish speakers has risen over the years. Thus, if content providers want to reach a broader audience and attract additional customers, it is beneficial to also make their content available in Spanish as well as English. This same issue also applies across the globe as the trend in most areas has been for populations to become more heterogeneous over time. However, when a multimedia production is released, such as a film, the production is often originally produced in only one language, thus limiting the potential viewing audience.
Two techniques have been employed to expand the target audience for content, namely subtitling and dubbing. Subtitles are typically derived from a transcript or screenplay of the dialog or commentary in films, television programs, video games, and so forth, and are usually displayed at the bottom of the screen mirroring the content's audio track. The subtitles may be in the form of a written translation of a dialog in a foreign language or a written rendering of the dialog often used to assist the hearing impaired. Depending on the technique employed, the encoding method for subtitles may be pre-rendered with the video or separate as either graphics or text to be rendered and overlaid by the receiver. Dubbing is a post-production process in which recordings of the actors are replaced with recordings performed by the same or different actors speaking another language. Depending on the technique employed, the dubbed audio may be pre-rendered with the recording, or separate streams may be maintained for the video and audio tracks, allowing multiple audio tracks to be switched in for the same video.
Presently, techniques employed to determine which audio language and/or subtitles to display, for a given video and user, require a manual selection by the user or assumptions based on the primary language of the user's country of origin. However, in the context of an online program delivery service in which a particular user may watch many movies or other programs, the user is forced to manually and repeatedly select the audio track and subtitle settings for each video, which can be extremely tedious. Furthermore, due to the increasingly diverse viewing audiences, basing the selection on the user's country of origin becomes less accurate over time.
Another issue also arises when users have very specific preferences of audio language and/or subtitles based on the content selected for playback. For example, a bilingual user may prefer to watch French movies with English dubbing and subtitles, but will watch Spanish movies in the original language with no subtitles. Thus, the user may be forced to constantly update their audio language and/or subtitle settings to conform to their preferences. Current techniques are not able to conveniently or efficiently address user preferences for subtitles and dubbing.